Ep. 74 -Human Nature and Human Habit with Yung Pueblo

Whatever it is that you do, make sure that you do with honesty, because that's why when you're being creative and you're creating music or drawing or whatever it is and you're actually feeling better at the end of it, that's because there's an massive amount of honesty that you're activating through the process. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. There are people in town, men, crazy people in town, eating bread and butter and honey, and drinking black coffee cola. They believe we are wild, men, they believe we are wild, just because we don't use any money and we drink no coffee cola.

Welcome to episode 74 of Synchronicity. My guest this week is Young Pueblo. I'm going to get to him in just a second. I was an extended little intro there, so that was Francis Bebe, and he's a Cameroonian artist and the reason I'm playing that song is A, it's an awesome song. It's called the Coffee Cola song, but also because it was a cool little synchronicity that happened this week, so I was listening to Shane Mouse had a really cool Here We Are podcast with the guest who wrote Spiced, which is basically exploring psychoactive substances. I was preparing to hear some talks about DMT or LSD or psilocybin or something like that, but in fact, a lot of the conversation revolved around salt, sugar, coffee. I forget what the other one was, but I found that to be really fascinating because, of course, those are psychoactive substances, right? I mean, we take it for granted in our culture and how things work, but that is exactly what's going on. It doesn't just have to be like weed or even alcohol, right? They weren't even looking at those, so I was thinking about all this stuff. I'm jogging around my garage because it's in a blizzard and you can't jog outside because there's three feet of snow. So I'm jogging around the garage, listening to this podcast, and I'm like, man, this is really, really interesting, fun, fun time. So then I put on, I go to do some work a little bit later, and I have this song pop up, which has been in my discover in Spotify before, and I was like, I really like that song, and I meant to mark it. I didn't. So I was like, oh, I just forgot about it. And then it came on again today. And that song is really awesome because he's talking about you here in the lyrics there. He's talking about coffee, sugar, and salt, and how people are acting crazy because of these things. So this is a nice little synchronicity. A nice way to get right before the intro. So now I'm going to move very quickly to young Pueblo. So this guy Diego is his first name. He is super cool. I got introduced to him. You'll hear at the beginning, through Sa de Simone, who is one of the coolest people I've met. He was a previous guest on this podcast, just a really, really cool, nice, helpful, genuinely wonderful person. He connected Diego and I, and Diego writes under this young Pueblo moniker on Instagram. You can find him at young_Pueblo.

And, you know, there's a lot of stuff on Instagram. There's a lot of stuff on social media. I've spoken about this before. There's a lot of memes. There's a lot of Instagram poets. There's a lot of social media, spiritual quote, Turner Outers. And, you know, I am one of those people. I put these to anyone who knows in the synchronicity group. I'm putting up a quote every day. But I do think there is a difference between people who, their intention primarily is to communicate something that they think will help someone else. So, I was abundantly pleased to see after Sa told me about Diego that under his young Pueblo moniker, it's just putting out really cool, insightful stuff that's easily digestible, yet profound, which is really adapting kind of, you know, ancient traditional forms of gaining insights of opossum and meditation in the S.N.

Goenka school. There's another synchronicity in the group. So, right after I had this conversation with Diego, there was a, someone in the group posted about, I think it was Melanie Bakowski. She posted in the group on Facebook asking about Vipassana meditations. And then I was like, you know, I've never done a big long one. You know, I have a limited experience, but I hear the S.N. Goenka schools are pretty good. And then like a bunch of people started chiming in about this particular school of meditation, insight meditation, and how profound it would be. And one thing I will say this about young Pueblo, everyone who was in the thread on the Facebook group, people who go on these 10 day retreats, there's not like a guarantee you're going to come out enlightened. I actually haven't met anyone enlightened who's come out of these things, but I will tell you they are lighter. They are way lighter there. Whatever they went in before, they seem to have some additional perspective that makes them seem a little bit later. It's not like a power up necessarily, but insight is gained when you have to like force to and are forced to confront your thoughts in your mind for 10 days. So Diego advocates mindfulness meditation. We talk about his early years as being a social activist, having a tremendous impact on local communities, working for things like prison abolishment, a tremendous amount of like really good will and service. But he you'll hear in this conversation, like he noticed that like the same things that were triggering him before external triggers were still getting to him. So like he get someone who would say something and he gets super angry and just like be rolling in it. And like I still to this day know exactly what that's like. So he started to look at ways to kind of deal with that and not kind of avoid it, but kind of get to the root of what's going on. And you know, we get into some really, really awesome stuff in this one. So we get into confusing human nature and human habit.

And this is really drilling down into the idea of, you know, having an ego and being competitive often feels like human nature. But in fact, and he'll make this dissertation, I agree with it, is that it's really just kind of like a delusion. That's something that is, you know, maybe taking, you know, an ancient part of the brain, like the amygdala and the reptilian brain and, you know, for a flight or fight type of thinking and rationale, you know, we don't have to do that, right? So spoken about this ad nauseam, you know, when Rhombas was still Richard Alpert, he was talking about that the inequity in the world was totally like it's not a resource issue. It's a distribution issue. It's like we have plenty of stuff that everyone can be okay. But yet, you know, the reports are coming out in the past couple of weeks, like 24 million people are potentially going to starve 24 to 50 million people. That's insane, right? That's like an insane thing that is going on in this day and age yet here it is. So we talk about ways to actually like really talk about balancing kind of the inequity, kind of, you know, climate change, things that seem like insurmountable problems. And what we really settle on, I think, in a lot of ways, which I was happy that this happened is that it starts with working on yourself. And then when you can get into a frame of mind or a way to approach these bigger issues with other people who feel like you, that that's a pretty powerful thing. And I think this also goes in line with kind of getting back in touch with kind of the tribal ancestry of how we would, you know, work with other people. You know, I heard I think it was on that Shane Mouse podcast. I forget in the guy's name. It was like John, he wrote the book Spice. So check it out. I'm actually going to pick it up this week.

Actually, here we go. Boom, boom. Haven't done one in a while. Just came to it. I'm going to give away this book book club this week. It's going on. It's been like what a month and a half. We're doing book giveaway. If you want to be entered in a contest to win a copy of this book Spice, which is exploring the intersection of marketing and psychoactive substances, I'm picking it up. I will get you a brand new copy. Join the Synchronicity community at sinkpodcast.com. There will be a little pop up, some intrusive, horrible thing. Just sign up there. I will send you emails once a week about episodes, about extra stuff, and you will forever be enrolled in when I do these book club giveaways. I randomly select from the excel sheet, I download, and you can have a copy of this book. Otherwise, just buy it. It's really good. I highly recommend it, but in the same episode, they were talking about how these tribal societies were actually pretty high functioning, but we've moved to kind of this nuclear family paradigm, and it just, it seems like a failed experiment in a lot of ways. It's not sustainable, especially when you expand it to the entire world. So I don't know about you guys, but for me, I've been meeting a lot of people and it feels like a very tribal in the best sense of the word situation. People are forming these tribes of people who really are trying to do positive things in the world and not necessarily just for money or for their ego, and that's really cool.

And I've been talking about that for at least 30, 40 episodes now. So I'm going to be quiet now, because I got off on three, four, five, maybe eight tangents just there. Enjoy this episode, follow Diego under his young Pueblo moniker. Again, that's Y-U-N-G underscore Pueblo P-U-E-B-L-O. Super, you'll hear in this conversation. I don't need to sell it. I don't need to sell it at all. Enjoy, and without further ado, here is young Pueblo. [Music] I'm doing well. How are you doing? I'm doing really well. I'm doing really well. That's it. I could say other things, but I really overall am doing pretty well. That's really good to hear. I'm excited to connect here. I'm glad Sock connected us. I've been kind of tuning in to what you've been doing recently, and I'm looking forward to what you have coming up. And more importantly, I'm just looking forward to connecting, because I think we have some cool things to discuss. Yeah, definitely. I'm excited. Yeah, I'm really grateful for Sock. He's really coming to my life and just been magical. I'm actually going to be doing a talk with him on the 19th, which I'm really excited about. Yeah, Sock is super awesome. I got introduced to him by a friend or through a friend, and he's just been a really, really awesome. I don't connect with him very often, but we're kind of always on each other's radar. And when we do connect, we always have a really good chat, and we just kind of seem very attuned to what's going on.

And I'm glad he's back in the area, which is especially cool. So yeah, it's pretty sweet. All right, so I think we can just get started. I mean, I think you sent over some topics that you are interested in discussing, and they happen to be very closely related, if not the exact same topics that I'm interested in discussing. But maybe before we get into the actual specific topics or areas of interest, you could tell me a little bit about yourself. What maybe I couldn't have gleaned through saw or the internet, and kind of how you got to the point where you're talking about some of the things you're talking about. Okay, so I got started a long time ago.

I'm about 29 years old right now. And I think my, since I was little, I was always very interested in freedom and liberation. So that got me into the path of being an activist since I was about 15 years old. And, you know, working with a lot of different groups and having a lot of successes, you know, doing a lot of really good organizing helped me see that people have a lot of power. But as I kept going and kept trying different forms of progressive and radical organizing, I saw that something was always missing. There was an internal aspect that was never really fully covered or developed, no matter how many books I read, no matter how many theories or different things we tried, I saw that something was always missing. You know, there was a, I didn't, I couldn't quite put my finger on it until I started meditating when I was about 24 years old.

And that's when I saw I was like, wow, okay, this is what liberation is. There's actually a massive internal universe that is asking to be discovered. And no matter how much we transform the world, we won't really have the full happiness and freedom unless we can really start releasing these burdens and these miseries that are completely embedded in our minds and bodies. Yeah, so I think that's where I'm trying to place myself is sort of in between these two worlds and just helping people, you know, share with people what I understand and try to show that it is through this healing and cleansing of the mind and the body that we can really transform the world and vice versa. I really feel that if these two worlds come together, it will really become an unstoppable force for global transformation and global peace.

And I'm excited to just see a lot more people being receptive to the message and a lot more people having the courage to actually dig deep within themselves because, you know, a lot of us have massive traumas, but sometimes we don't even know why we're running away from ourselves or we don't even know why we're just busying ourselves constantly, you know, it through the internet, through, you know, always being around other people and no longer really allowing any time for solitude to really delve deep and see, hey, you know, why don't I like spending time with my thoughts or with my feelings or whatnot? Because if when you actually start answering those questions, there's a lot of freedom there. Yeah, and I like that you use the term solitude, not pejoratively, because I think it can kind of get mixed into this healing of loneliness, which even by itself isn't necessarily the worst thing in the world, but being alone and creating time, whether it's through meditation or just going out in nature, you know, spending time with yourself is really important. One of my favorite people to speak about the important solitude, probably far more eloquently than I ever will, is Rainer Maria Rilke. And just just letters to a young poet, you know, some communications he had with a young writer who admired him and what he wrote back is just truly one of the like biggest and greatest expositions on the power of solitude and what you can learn. So what was some of the activism that you were involved with? So I did a lot of, I started off with youth activism. I was a part of this amazing organization and Boston called the Boston Youth Organizing Project, which was completely youth led, which is very rare. We have had adult support, so what you can imagine is a bunch of like 14, 15, 16, 17, 18-year-olds deciding our own campaigns, deciding our own program and how we're going to go trying to change things in the city and the schools and then having these adults who, you know, gave us trainings and also took care of the financial aspects of the nonprofit, but all decision-making power, even from the hiring and firing of adult staff was completely on top. That's awesome. You know, as a 15-year-old, it was just immense to see the complete inner workings of an organization and just be at the central aspect of it and just, you know, it was really, really empowering at a very young age. And I saw just amazing things.

We were able to accomplish, you know, we changed so many different policies and ways that schools ran, guidance counseling, the, you know, the transportation, the public transportation system, so many things we changed. And I went on from there and I took, I spent, I did my four years of hard time at Wesleyan University and then went on from there to do some prison abolition work where we formed another group in Boston to really focus on trying to end mass incarceration and just sort of bring forward prison abolition and did some housing justice work out in the West Coast for a little while, which taught me a lot about just how we can organize, you know, outside of nonprofits as well. Are you from Boston? Yeah. So I'm actually, I was born in Ecuador, but I spent most of my life in Boston. I grew up there in moved to the United States when I was four. So I'm a proud immigrant. Cool. Cool. Immigrants are good, despite what some people may have you lead you to believe. Yeah, I spent a lot of time in Boston. I went to college there, ended up spending about like seven or eight years in like the back Bay, northeastern Berkeley area, right? Yeah, I really enjoyed Boston. And I think it's interesting that, you know, it's a little bit, you know, older, but the youth that comes in via all the colleges there is just such a weird dynamic, very interesting dynamic of people kind of discovering who they are is people enmeshed in this large kind of metropolitan area. I think Boston's a really cool place holds a special place in my heart, that's for sure. Okay, so let's talk about mental knots, because you brought this up. And this is something that has been of significant interest to me as I found more and more time to create inner space or the conditions to actually kind of pursue what I want to pursue in my life. But mental knots are something that seem to plague almost everyone.

And, you know, I'll tell you what my kind of vague impression of them are from, from my, you know, insight practices is that I don't think I'm going to get to the point where I'm going to completely eliminate mental knots. But when I can have awareness of when they're coming, maybe some certain causes or conditions for them arising, that gives me some power or resources to then go kind of tackle and try to unravel these things. So I would love to hear your perspective on mental knots and how it's kind of plating your personal life and now you're writing. Yeah, definitely. So the first time I was introduced to mental knots was in the posse and so I meditated a posse now as taught by S. N. Glenka.

Cool. Great. I'll say to you about Ken lineage. And, you know, when I first heard about the poly term for knots as Sankaras, and at first it was really difficult to understand because, you know, we all generally have a grasp of karma, but understand that internal dynamic of Sankaras and how we're sort of accumulating all of these patterns and they become really deeply embedded in our mind and sink to our subconscious and, you know, affect all of our actions was really kind of shocking to me. But as I kept meditating, kept doing different, more and more retreats, more 10 day retreats, I started doing a lot of research on my own outside of that. And I noticed that it wasn't just something that was particular to this lineage that I was a part of. It wasn't just a Theravade an idea, but it was all over the place. So like the, you know, the Vedic and Tantra path, they have a very similar understanding of the poems from Sankaras.

Yes, exactly. Other places also understand them. A lot of Western therapists are also coming to understand how deeply rooted these patterns are, because you can call them knots, you can call them patterns, you can call them habits. There are a lot of different words for them, but they're essentially what I noticed is that, you know, there are these moments when something can happen in your life, some sort of external trigger, let's say someone trying to make you angry, you know, so quickly before in the past, I would just get angry and I would start rolling an anger. And then all of a sudden I started seeing the more meditative there was, there was an option there. It was like, Hey, you can either anger or you can even create some karma for yourself by maybe lashing out at the person or hitting them or something like that.

But there was actually an option and more and more space that you can create through meditating, through developing a concentration of calmness so that you can, as opposed to reacting, you know, responding and saying, I can engage with this person this way or that way, or maybe not even at all. And I can just say good day and continue about my business. But I saw how much power there was for us to reclaim if we actually started understanding these internal mechanics and even outside of the meditating spectrum, all of us have mental nuts, you know, we all are minds. I think what we understand as our ego is actually a composition, a massive accumulation of habits and patterns. And these patterns are not necessarily geared towards our freedom and our happiness.

So when we actually start doing things that are different, building new habits, building things that will actually lead us to having more response time, as opposed to just immediately reacting, we can completely, completely change our lives. I mean, I love everything you're saying and cultivating that space. I'm at the point where I'm not a heavy meditator. I'm doing 15 minutes of Shimata meditation Tibetan Buddhist open eye meditation, and we're going, you know, camabiding essentially, not totally different from a lot of Tarraban. But one thing I, the stage ramat is the space is noticeable. It's there. Nine times out of 10, I am unable to change my reactive pattern. That being said, that's not a criticism of meditation. I think it's more of a, I need to step this shit up so I don't create screams, continue to react. I do absolutely take it is that I see the immense power because I mean, before, I mean, I can even go back to when I was a kid. If you would have told me when I was a kid, just, you know, getting upset about something, you know, when your ego is in full throws and starting to develop and for functional reasons, too. I mean, that's, you know, one of these things that when we're talking about the ego, not to digress too much is, you know, if you take psychedelics, if you do meditation, if you have some type of transcendental experience, the self can start to dissolve and you can even see the layers of it kind of unravel. And that's, you know, people refer to that as the ego.

You know, as much as we trash on the ego and as much harm as it has done for ourselves and collectively for the world and ego out of control, you know, it has a functional use, which is to navigate this three dimensional world to keep us away from danger, you know, to keep us away from various things. So it does have a function and the goal is to obliterate it and stay in this state of constant, you know, nothingness or lovingness or whatever the root source of what we're gonna eventually talk about here. That's good. But I also feel like, and I was taught this, let's go into a broader conversation. We're on the same wavelength with this stuff, man. I'm super excited for this conversation. So my friend today was asking me, he was saying essentially that he thinks he understands the universe, but he doesn't know what to do. You know, and I was like, listen, if you really think you're understanding the universe and I'm not putting this beyond anyone's capacity to understand truthfully, I mean, I know there's a mystery that there's some things we can't penetrate, but I do think there is a general way of understanding why we're here, what the point of it is, why there's a purpose of this, how this fits into a broader cosmology and what ultimately may be going on.

I do believe that that's notable. Some people may argue that, you know, it's a delusion or whatever. Regardless, I said to him, I said, listen, if you think you understand it, I hope you come away with what you should be doing, some actionable steps, right? Because unless you're a nihilist, and he goes, well, I think I'm a nihilist. And I go, I don't think so. Like, I know you. I mean, you wouldn't, you wouldn't be doing some of the things you'd be doing if you really were a nihilist. You'd be acting a completely different way. So let me ask you this. Let me flip it around. What do you, do you think there is a reason we've incarnated here on Earth as humans? And if so, you know, what's the, what's the broader context of that for you?

That's a great question. I want to touch on a couple things. So one, I think one thing that you were saying really reminded me about how easily we confused human nature and human habit. So we think that, you know, having our ego, having cravings, having aversions is really normal and natural and to fight each other and compete and whatnot. But it's really that, I would say that's a delusion because when you actually start trying to set yourself up for internal success, you start seeing that human nature is actually something that's quite different. And I wouldn't say that I know exactly what it is, but I definitely can say that it's not competition. And it's not fear and whatnot. I think those things are, like you said, they're tools. They help us. I think particularly, you know, before civilization came to the point that it is now, it's extraordinarily beautiful to be fearful. But if you want to be free, there you have to come out of fear.

So in terms of us incarnating on Earth now, I think it's, I think it's a special time that we live in. I think generally we come onto Earth and we live, we live and breathe so that we can learn. But I feel like this time that we're in right now is so special. I think if you look at so many different groups of people, they've talked and written about this time in a lot of different meditation traditions and indigenous traditions, they talk about this moment that we're in this sort of like next, this hundred year period that we're in that is going to be completely transformative. And even if you sort of even if you take it out of the meditative and indigenous contexts, and you just look at what's happening, it's like, hey, like humanity is reckoning is going to happen within these next hundred years. You know, we've the amount of imbalance that we've caused is going to come back as a collective karma that we have to deal with as a humanity.

So we're going to have to best start now, right? I mean, that's kind of the general. I think, yeah, man, I couldn't agree with you more about this particular. I mean, time is again, a very interesting concept. And I think the more you kind of delve into the inner nature, the concept of time also erodes, which is interesting, and that, you know, puts any historical context for this stuff into a different frame. That said, I agree with you 100%. I mean, even if we're not looking at this in a mystical or kind of otherworldly, ethereal way, let's just look at the technological advances that we're going through, the communications advances that we're going through, you know, for more of the the left-brained people who want to be a little more analytical or logical about it, it would be hard to disagree that things aren't changing at an increasingly rapid rate.

So, yeah, if you take those things that you just mentioned and then combine them, juxtapose them with, you know, the massive inequality that the globe is facing, the challenge of climate change. And it's how are we going to sort of connect these two to the to create a well-being for all of humanity? Because I feel like that's ultimately our challenge is, can we make compassion practical? And can you can we as a human people realize that it is deeply in my benefit to not harm other people? And I was not harming myself but to not harm others because, you know, when you when you have a society where people are just have their needs met, I think that's when the real magic of humanity is going to start happening. But I wanted to say something else too. I feel like something that's that is really missing is the I'm not even sure how to say it, but more of the ethereal, I'm not even ethereal, but to see the miracle of peace, to see the miracle of having like a technique tons as, you know, the greatest miracle is someone to walk peacefully on the earth, to see someone who can just engage with life in a way that's absolutely sincere and face the ups and downs of assistitudes of life in a way where they are not shattered or hurt in any way. I think that that in itself is a miracle. And I feel like a lot of us who you call like old souls or people who are just naturally attracted to things that are, you know, these really old traditions or, you know, different ways of being outside of the western what the western world calls normal.

I think, you know, we're here, we're here to sort of help the earth remember that there's a whole other side to being human, you know, we're extraordinarily powerful. And I think, yeah, like we can understand the structure of the universe by understanding our own internal world because the whole universe, you know, think about how we're composed as individual human beings when you are meditating deeply, even if you're doing 15, 20 minutes or taking that to like, you know, hundreds of hours, you will really start understanding how things are structured. If you look at go to mother Buddha, when he is the story of him reaching enlightenment, when he reached enlightenment, he not only came out with the solution to suffering, but he understood full physics.

That's right. Up to the subatomic level, he knew he called him Palapas. He was like, there are these tiny little things that change about a trillion times a second. And you can't really, you know, he understood that they were in like particle and wave form. Right, right. Not to cut you up, but I just do want to interject that I always laugh. Something that the Dalai Lama has famously said is like, he goes, and this is tongue in cheek for people who get it. He says, if science disproves any part of Buddhism, we'll change it. And what he's really saying is, listen, guys, we appreciate that you empirically want to study the outside world to understand everything. But there's another way to do this. We've been doing this for a few thousand years.

We're passing it down in ways that you quite haven't fully grasped yet. But trust that there is another path and it's the inner path, which to me, I mean, if you look in any, now it's becoming, if you dig deep enough nowadays with the aid of the internet, and I remember you're 29, so I'm 33. So we're not totally distant in an age. I do remember a time of dial tones and dial up internet and not Wikipedia and not Google. And it was very difficult to find information. You'd be lucky if you got clued into a book or something. As evidence of this is, if I had been looking for something like the autobiography of a yogi back then, it would have been difficult for me to find.

I'd have to go to the library or something and know that it's there. Nowadays, you know, that's one of the most seminal, you know, most recommended books that kind of open people's eyes to some of these other cultures, Vedic stuff. My point is this is that, you know, we're in a tremendous nexus point, clearly, for being able to process, grasp, and understand. We also have access to our own innate wisdom, which is what all the great masters, Buddhas, avatars, Jesuses have said throughout time immemorial is that listen, listen, listen, guys, like it's great that I'm doing all this stuff, but you can do it too. Like I wouldn't be saying all this because I'm some special person. And what look at me and how great I am. I'm a celebrity. Take my picture.

They're like, listen, I am saying this truthfully. What is possible for me is surely possible for you. Here's some stuff. And this emphasizes your point about the ego and how maybe some of its archaic functionality from, you know, you know, the reptilian amygdala to the neocortex, which we have now, you know, we have some higher functionality of how to do this. I would look at this too in another way. Just a practical benefit of this is I've noticed this in business, right? I've been lucky enough to make my career as a freelancer, as a digital strategist and various other means. And one thing I've been struck by is that, especially with an older generation, not exclusively, and I don't say this generally, but there is a mindset in business where there is a limited piece of there's one pie, and there's a limited amount of slice for everyone. And if you get a slice of that pie, that means I can't have a piece of that pie. And what's weird is, is we know this, we know this for a fact, you can do the math, you can add up all of the global resources, and there is plenty for everyone. It is not a question of there not being enough. It's a question of distribution, inequality, economic systems. So that's not the issue. We're not saying, well, there's not enough, and this earth isn't enough for everyone. It is. So this highlights the point of non competition, which is something that I think it's very difficult to grasp even for me, right? I'm in this point where I always have to g-check my ego and be like, oh, what's going on here? Like, are you sure that this is actually what you're trying to do? So I wonder, what are some of the other qualities I obviously have tuned in to view them myself? But what are some of the other qualities that you think maybe this reality is trying to evoke from us?

Yeah, I love talking about the example of scarcity. I mean, you just hit it on the dot. I think that when I think of capitalism, I think that as the physical embodiment of the collective human ego, it has come together and just, you know, completely become a global platform that we all work on. But if you think about it, it really sort of supports all the things that our teachers tried to teach us in kindergarten. We didn't quite get it. You know, when they taught us in kindergarten, hey, you should share. Hey, you know, don't fight. Don't hurt someone else. You can actually talk about it or, you know, just be nice to each other. These simple things that they try to embed in us when we were children, you know, capitalism, it generally works against it from my analysis and from many other people's. I know some people are like diehard capitalism fans and believe there's different ways to go about having better capitalism. Well, they view it as an aspect of freedom, right? And we're at what we're basically saying is, well, yeah, sure, but what we have right now isn't freedom. Obviously, it's kind of a perverted version of first one in line wins.

And that's not freedom. And that's what I say. It's not freedom. If I'm just allowing my greed to run wild. Yeah, I think that's if you call that freedom, sure, but I would, you know, I just don't agree. I think we can absolutely build a world that can have them at the very minimum, the material needs of a person met. Because when we can sort of divvy up the world in a way what that really supports the the well-being of individuals, we can create amazing things. And I've read there's this wonderful book that that I love. It's called nonzero. And it's like the evolution of human society or something like that. And it really talks about how, you know, we're we've been given the story that humanity has come to where it has come through competition. But really it's cooperation. I think that competition is definitely an aspect of it. But if you look, it's actually working within a field of cooperation. And I really think that humanity can succeed and thrive. If we actually start cooperating now, I'm very much in support of the freedom of the individual for them to do and create as they please, as long as they don't harm other people, of course.

So I don't think that the answer might not quite be out there yet as to like what is our next form of social organization. But I do not think that we're very far away from it. I think that we really start. That's that's why I encourage so much internal development and encourage people to go into their inward journey. Because when you start removing and releasing all these mental knots, the amount of clarity that you have is amazing. You know, you're able to process things in ways where, you know, you can actually have your logic and your reasoning based in love, based in compassion and say, Hey, you know, what is the best thing that I can do right now for myself and for everyone around me? That's right. And I feel like these answers are just, you know, they're not that difficult. They can we can achieve them. It'll take work. But I think we can absolutely live in a world that's, you know, that's post capitalist that really just meets everyone's needs and also supports everyone's freedom. I agree 100%. I'm also to play devil's advocate in the sense of looking at our time. And I do not. I'm so like, let's just go to Donald Trump land and all of these other things that are taking over the world. In a lot of ways, I am not a doom and gloom person.

I heard a wonderful analogy from someone who's been on this podcast, Dr. Bruce Damer. I had been describing it kind of like cancer. If you knew you'd want to know you had cancer, so you could treat the cancer, but I heard an even better analogy, which was think of Donald Trump and this current brand of extremism and intolerance and non compassion and, you know, untruthfulness. Think of it kind of like a vaccine, right? You need the vaccine. You need a little dose. You need a dose. And it may feel like an immense dose right now and you may react very negatively to the foreign non healthy productive virus that's in you. But eventually your body comes in rallies and fights it off and they go, Hey, guess what? That's not going to happen again because we know what this looks like and we know how to deal with it. So that's what my general impression of what's going on now. And I do think it's important for all of us who feel that what we're seeing is not the right way to not let ourselves. This is the real practice, I think, for for those of who kind of understand that is to not get jaded, not get hateful, not get bitter and not lash out in ways that are very similar to what we're saying. We don't like when we see someone like Donald Trump and doing all of these things. So we are presented here with an amazing opportunity where on one level from the top down kind of capitalist political spectrum, we're getting this picture of the reality of our world as some where we're descending into a death spiral essentially. And I don't want to say that that's not potentially happening. Our planet cannot take a certain amount of our planet can. Let's be clear here. Planet's going to be fine. We're not going to be fine. Yeah, that's the difference here. We're planets good. It's a self correcting mechanism, as George Carlin said, it's totally going to be fine. Don't worry people. It's going to be good. We're not. But we're seeing getting presented this picture of this very kind of bleak. And this language is even being tapped into by Donald Trump and people like that. They're they're preying on that. The fearful aspect of our amygdala that is just constantly trying to figure out food, shelter, survival. On the other hand, at least from this me doing this podcast, working with the people I've worked with for the past five, six years, talking to people like you, people having, you know, legitimately dozens of these conversations a week at this point. I also sense that there's this huge ground swell. I don't even want to call it ground grass roots. It's just like, it's almost like the middle out thing from Silicon Valley. It feels like there is this huge kind of resonance of people, even amidst all of this kind of dysfunction and shadow stuff that's going on who not only understand that there's another way and that there's tools that we can use to actually promote that. But that also a big part of this is facing our collective and individual shadow aspects. I'm a big Jungian person. And I think the more we push that stuff away and make it negative and make it bad and we don't want to deal with it and know, you know, what's going to be good people, the more we kind of cut ourselves off from the duality of our own nature. And, you know, let's, I agree at the, I'm not saying I agree. I assume you believe this that the essence of everything is, you know, oneness, it's unity. It is this single vibration.

That said, I also know we live in a dualistic universe, right? Good evil, you know, hot cold, like that is a clear function of the reality we're living in. But I, when I guess what I'm saying here is that I think we're at this, it's like these things are rubbing up against each other or bumping this friction is happening. And this in my estimation is the catalyst that does kind of, maybe over dozens, maybe over hundreds, who knows, however long period of years it's going to be, this is going to promote some positive change. And I think as we kind of get closer and closer to this inflection point of like, this is, this is when it's going to have to happen, weirder and weirder shit starts to happen. And I mean, out there in the world, not just internally, we've all had weird internal experiences, but I'm, we're starting to see it projected out into our physical reality, which is much harder for many of us to discount than some inner situation.

I was pretty excited, wasn't I? Here I am in the middle of the episode again. It's funny to find you here, listener of Synchronicity. This Saturday, March 18th in Los Angeles. I would love to make your acquaintance come meet me other podcasters on MindPod Network. We're going to be talking all day. Stop in for however long you want, all day, just a little bit, whatever. That's it. I'm loving this episode. I don't know about you guys. Here we are back to the episode. Somewhere in there, there's a question that you're going to respond to. No. You spoke so beautifully. So I, that's one of the reasons why, so my name is Diego Perez, but I write under the name Young Pueblo. Young Pueblo not only reminds me of my roots, you know, and Ecuador, Pueblo is significant of the people, the poor masses. And that's where I come from.

But when I also think of the name Young Pueblo, it reminds me of humanity and how young we are, collectively we're very young. And I think that we're sort of going from, you know, childhood to almost like our older teenage years, but really growing up right now. And when I think of, you know, Donald Trump and what's happened with his election and all these things that are coming to the surface, all of the patriarchy, the racism, all this transphobia, Islamophobia, all these things that sort of has been, you know, embedded in our culture for however, you know, for so long, but is now coming to the surface. It reminds me of an individual going to a meditation retreat, having all these things that are inside of them. And then they're coming to the surface and they're creating massive storms. So one, that's one thing that I've started writing about more often is when you're really delving deep within yourself through whatever practice it is that you use, things are going to come up. And at times they're going to cause storms, not all the time, but sometimes they're going to cause these big internal storms. And I feel like what's happening now in the United States is very similar to that analogy of the individual just, you know, going deep and then all these things are coming out. And you're sort of shocked by, you know, you kind of knew it was there. Now you, you know, it's a great analogy. Yeah. It's kind of shocking. And I feel like this is what's happening in America. Now it's, it's, you know, you know, you know, the racism was always there. I mean, think about how this country was built. And now it's all coming to the surface and why it's for release. You know, there's more, there's even more things beyond the Donald Trump's, that are side of our collective America, but they just need to keep being released. They need to come to the surface for release so that we can really start building a new world and, you know, living lighter lives because that's one, one of the beautiful things when you're actually start healing yourself is that you feel so much lighter and clearer. But before then, you may come through a number of storms when you're actually having these like gestation periods where you're releasing these massive knots that have been hindering you limiting your happiness for your whole life. Yeah. So it's anyone that's one of the things I wrote the day after he was elected. And yeah, I think it really resonated with a lot of people. I'm like, what's happening now is just it's, it's the, it's the release. It's all coming to the surface. All that the things that we want to be rid of, you know, have to show their face. You know, you can't kill something if you ignore it. Well, this is, yeah, I mean, this is a jumping off, but this is dependent on our awareness. Let's put it like this.

When before, before you meditated before I had psychedelic experiences or meditation had any deeper insight into, you know, how my mind was working, which for me, I had a very, I started with psychedelics LSD and mushrooms about when I was 15, which is a very interesting time to be going through adolescence, shifting into later teenage years and adulthood and taking psychedelics, which kind of feels like what the world is doing right now, right? It's like there, it's, there's definitely is this shift, but they also seem like they took some drugs and so that stuff is going on too. So I kind of know what it's like, but this is dependent on our awareness of these things going on. If we are unaware or unwilling to face this collectively individually, then it's not necessarily this hopeful picture of we're transitioning into a more effective, you know, Shambhala, like society, but we are wasting potentially, you know, our precious human lives, as Buddhists would refer them to as rather. And, you know, we're kind of just choosing to stay asleep. Now, there's another aspect of this too, and I'm not a big conspiracy person, but there certainly seems to be some active manipulation of mass communication tools and systems to purposely delude all of us. I would hardly just put this on people who think that Donald Trump is looking out for them from an economic standpoint, right? I would put this from everyone who has a particular bent or agenda. And the way these things can be manipulated in this day and age is something that I think there also needs to be an awareness of. And it's not like, though, this is a hopeless, we're living in 1984, there's nothing we can do. Paradoxically, I think the same tools we're talking about here are natural antidotes against that. You get a little more insight into how these things can actually be deployed against you. And I'm specifically talking about, you know, some of the stuff that's come to light with how, you know, some of the very aggressive targeting and profiling of people on social media seemingly very much impacted the election. And it was basically a concerted effort, you know, by Cambridge Analytica, a very big data mining company to create very accurate profiles of people, psychological profiles of people, you know, based on their Facebook mentions and their social media activity. Not to, yeah, and not in the traditional way we would think about it. Like if I'm a brand, I want to advertise to you because you like this, the opposite to depress the vote to say, Oh, well, you were going to vote for this person. Well, here's some shit about them there that you might not like. And instead of you going, Oh, well, fuck this person, you just go, Well, maybe I don't need to vote because they don't seem so great to confuse the situation. So this is, this is clearly an element that exists now that we, I think most people don't aren't aware of, and also that can potentially have an unknown to a negative effect on how we approach our own minds.

So I'd be curious is a, how do you think we combat that? I know it's a lot of the same tools that we're doing, but recognizing that it's not as though this stuff has necessarily naturally evolved alongside of us from like an evolutionary standpoint, although on some of you could argue that, but that there are active people who understand the unconscious and how the mind reacts to symbols and, you know, how people can be manipulated through various things. How do we reconcile that with kind of trying to evoke or promote an idea of where we can go as a civilization, kind of some of the stuff we're talking about. Definitely. It's, it's funny. I love the way you say, you know, it's almost conspiratorial to say the government lies. People, the people who, you know, want to be in charge, these politicians, and you know, they're lobbyists and whatnot, the whole lot of them. But if you study a little bit of history, you understand the government lies, that's they do that. They do that all the time. Funs in almost, yeah. And, and I think that's actually a really empowering reality for you, for people to come in terms with, you know, okay, the government lies. Now, let me see what I can do. You know, I really, I tell this to people all the time, my friends, the people who read my writing, my faith is not in these, you know, up down bottom power structures. My faith is in people and my faith is particularly in people who are turning the idea of unconditional love into a way of life. And that, that is, you know, it's not something that is immaterial, but it's actually, if you really are growing your love and making your love for yourself unconditional, for those around you, around you unconditional, or as best as you can, that is actually a very active love that you can use to transform the world. You know, that's what makes you go out there and want to protest or start different organizations that are actually circular as opposed to pyramidal. That's one thing that I talk about often too is, you know, our whole world is built into these pyramids where people at the top have more money and more power than people at the bottom. And what we need to start moving ourselves towards is having circular shares of power and wealth so that there is no waste and no one is oppressed. So when you actually start building in these modes of the world that you want to see, I think that's where the magic happens. And I think it's true that I actually really believe that, like you were saying, all these different people that you're talking to on a weekly basis, I really believe that there's a silent revolution happening. You know, we're very quiet, but we're very active. We're talking to each other, we're teaching each other what we know, and we're actually empowering each other in a way that's very different from the past. Because when we deal with our beautiful and, you know, these aspects that really limited us before, we can just create all these new things. And I encourage people, because what you said was really true, you know, who has the awareness of, or who has some awareness of their internal reality, to be able to understand the external situation, not all of us. But something that is happening, and I would say very, very highly, is that it's almost magical. But people are looking for deeper answers more than ever before. People are looking for deeper healing. There's more and more people talking about self-care and self-love, and what that really means than ever before that I've seen around my life. That's true. That's without a doubt, without a doubt. Three that I've studied.

And when you actually start delving deeply into these ideas and start seeing what they look like on a practical level, that will make you turn inward and actually start dealing with your own stuff, start dealing with whatever it is that you may have been running away from. And actually deal with these things that you develop a clarity where the answers will be very, very clear. You'll know what to do. And I think I as an individual can say, "Hey, this is what we need to do." I really think that's a collective. That's where we don't want to reproduce the ills that society has tried to condition us, to always try to reproduce amongst each other. But we want to decide things together so that we can live in a world where no one is oppressed. And I absolutely believe that's possible. And all of talking to you now, working with our buddy, Sahu, we just mentioned earlier, and all these amazing people in New York City and that I met around the world that give me so much hope because it's almost like they came here. They chose to be born now in this group. I know what you're saying, man. The Europe that we need, you know? It's totally true. I know exactly what you're saying. And it also falls in line with, you know, I think it was tiknahan who said the next Buddha will be the Sangha, right? And it's not going to be an individual.

It's going to be the community coming together, which to me, I had a mushroom trip that shook me for a little bit. It was very much Christ consciousness thing. And I was struck that when Jesus, this is what occurred to me. And I still believe this. When Jesus said he would come back, I believe he meant what he said. I don't think he's going to rise up from the ground and say, I'm Jesus. What's up, guys? I think he is coming back as a consciousness. I think he is coming back as a mode of thinking and being that can literally spread much quicker than a person going from town to town. I'll be like, Hey, I got some news. Here's the good news. So I do think that people are tapping into these frequencies more and more. I always I've mentioned it on this podcast plenty of times. But you know, 15 years ago, now longer, 18 years ago, you know, I would have maybe a conversation like this in a college dorm. I don't know, a few times a year, usually aided by psychedelics.

Nowadays, I mean, granted, I have, you know, created a little slice of the world where we can talk about this stuff more often. However, you know, I get this stuff from everywhere. You see it in popular culture, you see all of these kinds of transcendental elements, either knowingly or unknowingly getting woven into the fabric of our lives, that it's hard to discount that this is happening. And to me, you know, another thing I want to touch on too about this, this aspect of clarity, to me, these are the two kind of beacons in my life. Currently, that guide every decision I make. And if they, you know, and I can reference them back if I've made a decision not out of them, which is wisdom and compassion and wisdom, I define as clarity and clear seeing, you know, we're talking about using inner resources or tools or anything, teachings, whatever we want to call them to cultivate these senses of clarity and compassion. I think a big part of being in this world is that you're not going to elect to stay in a permanent state and be able to stay there.

There are these oscillations that take place. So you can maybe go up in the spiral of awareness, but it doesn't mean you're going to hit this plateau of utopia. And everything is going to be great for you and everything around you. I just don't think that's how this reality works, nor should it, right? If it did, it would be very boring and be just wouldn't work the way it does now. We need to have, again, this is this is a function of suffering, right? This is where, you know, and all Buddhists do not view this the same, but, you know, to me, suffering has a function and it's to awaken us to the fact that there is suffering. So we can escape it and then figure out how to teach other people to potentially get out of it. That's its function. It's not some, like, evil, malevolent thing that it's like, I'm suffering and I'm going to get you. It's like, no, that's not why it exists. That would be a really stupid way of doing things. So, you know, I wanted to just point that out because I think when we're talking about the benefits of all of these things and just kind of, you know, I think we both are generally optimistic about the potential that exists for positive change is when we're talking about these, it can sometimes feel like we're getting to an idealistic place of stability where everything is great. And I just don't think, especially in our lifetimes, definitely in our lifetimes, that's the goal. The goal is to move towards that in every way that we can and make sure that our intention is aligned with our aspiration to alleviate our own suffering and thereby the sufferings of a suffering of other beings everywhere.

So let's, I mean, I would love because you brought it up. I have a little, the notepad here, not that I've had to reference it too much because I think we could talk for a very long time, but talk about a little bit of what have you found in terms of the malability of the mind and the ability to release what you refer to as old misery and habits? Yeah. So, you know, it ties in well with what you were saying. So, one of the prophecies that I really like is the mind prophecy talking about how, you know, the 2012, how the world will never be the same. And they talked that the other side of that prophecy was that what's a total was going to come back, very similar to what you were saying about Jesus.

Like Jesus was going to come back and take any time saying that the, you know, the Buddha, the next Buddha will be the song death. That would be the collective, you know, all of us who practice. And it's the same prophecy over and over and over. So, what it really just makes me think is that it's really up to us to, you know, how much courage we have to start tinkering with our mind a little bit, you know, instead of just facing, instead of just living our lives facing outward, turning inward and saying, Hey, okay, this is how I feel. This is a suffering I have. Let me see what I can do about it. So, what I encourage people is that, you know, everyone's going to have different tools that suit them better for their process. So, you know, not everybody's going to be able to meditate or not meditate right now. So, I encourage people, there's a lot of different ways to be able to start releasing these knots that are deeply connected to our misery and the patterns that causes misery. So, there are many things. So, you can practicing yoga asanas, absolutely burns knots. You know, energy healing, like you mentioned before, psychedelics is absolutely burning knots.

It really helps get rid of patterns very quickly. I think, you know, even going out to nature, spending time alone in solitude, but also being very honest about what you're feeling and not trying to avoid anything that you're feeling. I think all of these things, anything that can bring you a calmness and a bit of concentration will start this process of releasing, releasing, releasing. And, you know, these knots are very deeply embedded into our subconscious, but one thing that my teacher, S. N. Goenka says is that when we have these moments of of equanimity when, and we're actually observing what we're feeling, our sensations, it actually burns these knots very, very, very quickly. So, much faster than we actually make them. So, the mind is absolutely malleable. And from my own search, I definitely see that.

I believe that the mind that we have is as vast as the universe. So, if you really want to know the universe and you want to know, you know, what love is, what compassion is, and if you want to understand something, you know, how the physical aspects of the universe, how it all works, wow, just close your eyes and start exploring. Have a technique that will actually, you know, can actually produce results that you know, produces results and, and have fun, you know, go in there. It's going to be a wild ride, but you can really, really change the structure of your mind. You know, if you meditate for long hours, you actually start feeling how, in terms of like gray matter or your prefrontal cortex, you feel the heat in the very front of your mind, in your forehead, you feel how it's just churning and becoming stronger and stronger and stronger.

And the reptilian parts there in the back of the mind are just losing power, losing power. So, in terms of changing the structure of your mind, how it works, well, not the structure of your mind, but the, you know, the habits that are inside the structure of the mind, it is absolutely possible. I think for myself personally, like, oh, one thing that I dealt with a lot was I had so much fear and sorrow in me and not necessarily related to things that happened to me in my life. Some of them definitely, but it was just so much of it. And when I would go away to these meditation courses and I'd meditate my 100 hours, it would just be coming out in droves and I would be shocked.

You know, I'd feel like, wow, this is a ridiculous amount of anxiety and sorrow that I have in me. And now when I live my life, there is so much less of it. I have so much more freedom. And the lightness, yeah. It's a deep, deep lightness so that I can much better interact with my surroundings, my peers and the ups and downs of life, you know, and then I can support the people around me in much, much better ways. And one more thing that I wanted to touch on was the linearity of what you were talking about, you know, so like, yes, I deeply believe at the time, there's a high potential for humanity to be moving into a golden age, though there will be many, many storms on our way to get there because there are a lot of things that we need to release and like, oh, collectively for us to get there. But I don't think that it's going to be like that forever. I think that like, like you said, there are ups and downs in the universe. And if you look at a lot of different, you know, ancient ways, they deeply understand that that everything happens in cycles. So right, luckily, right now we're in a cycle where we're moving out of the darkness and going into times of awareness and understanding. And though these next, you know, 50 to 100 years will be at times a bit chaotic, because we have very major challenges that we need to overcome.

Ultimately, you know, maybe our great grandchildren or great, great grandchildren will see and live in an immensely beautiful world. But necessary, it's going to last forever because like the, like the Buddha, the Buddha sassana, which is the Buddhist teaching, you know, the Buddha said very clearly that my teaching will last for 5,000 years, and then it will be gone. And then Buddha will come, but it may be, you know, eons from now, it may be far from now. So I think that's something that's really interesting. And I think a lot of other different cultures also understand this that yeah, it comes in cycles. And why does it come in cycles?

Why isn't it always going to be perfect? It's because we need to learn. It's right. It's a spiral. That's that's it's an upward spiral, which is a concept many people have tapped into over the years. And you said a lot of stuff there that I want to touch on. But I wanted to add one thing that has become increasingly more and more important in my life in terms of exploring inner stuff, and also providing a release, which is necessary, as you're pointing out, which is creativity. And trying to hone all of our own innate creativity, which everyone is creative, everyone has latent talents and abilities in the arts, and creative problem solving, and using their own creativity to make their lives better. And one of the things that, you know, I'm launching soon in the next month, and I've been trying to figure out what angle to approach all of this stuff, because I love having these conversations. There's so many different angles from the mindfulness, from the neuroscientific to the psychedelic, but one that has always been a big part of my life is music. But in a broader context is creativity. And I've found, especially in the past year, establishing a daily creative practice, however long in whatever discipline or whatever area you want to focus on provides very similar results to a meditative practice. I do both of them, because I don't think they're mutually exclusive. But I found that there's an some of the things that turn people off, including myself at times from meditation, is this idea of what meditation needs to look like, or what the function of meditation is, or you're trying to quiet your mind and lo and behold, when you go and try to quiet your mind, what happens? All of your thoughts come rushing out. It doesn't work the way you thought it was going to work. You suck at meditating.

So rather than, you know, lamenting the fact that this is the case, I like to hedge my bets in as many as possible. And I think this this quality of lightness and levity has been in the past lacking from a meditative discipline. And that's beginning to erode kind of those shackles. And I think people understand it can be many different things. But a way to kind of merge those things together is teaching people or letting people know that it's easy to set up a creative practice, whether that's writing, whether that's making music, whether it's painting, whether it's dancing, whether it's going for there's many different things that can be creative in your life.

That to me seems to be meshing with kind of this, this is a broader theme too. And you didn't specifically mention it, but a lot of people seem to be tapping into it. I first had this thought or impression 15, 17, something like that years ago is that this imbalance of the patriarchy, you know, which I don't use as a buzzword, but as, you know, a culture type that has dominated our historical landscape, at least in modern history, dating back thousands of years, even, is showing its cracks, you know, the foundation is cracking. More and more people are recognizing this isn't the way to do it. And at the same time, we're getting more of these kind of feminine, divine feminine, feminine, mysticism qualities reemerging that have kind of been subjugated over the past 2000 years, especially 2500. And we're seeing this kind of, you know, percolate up into our own consciousnesses and collective consciousnesses. And I think a big aspect of that is this creative aspect, this creation, this ability to create things that didn't exist before, you know, manifest them, not that they didn't exist before, but to manifest them in the world. And I think that's kind of what you're talking about in terms of being able to move into a golden age. My question for you related to what you said though is like what prophecies specifically are you looking at that point to kind of these timelines? Because I always have in my head, one of the timelines, not that I take this part and believe this part in parcel, but is the the Kali Yuga, right, which this is a period of time, you know, culminating in thousands of years cycle to multi dozens of thousands of years that this is an age when people are losing the ability to meditate, we have to subsist on, you know, gross physical matter to survive, no longer can we be ethereal light beings. And it's kind of like an end of a cycle that we're in the middle of where things kind of degenerate and people would look at Donald Trump and say, Oh, look, see, it's the Kali Yuga, things are going to shit, which doesn't necessarily fit in exactly what I like you think we are potentially on the cusp of a creative renaissance, of a spiritual renaissance, of a collective unity and cooperative period. I don't believe that's guaranteed to happen, but I clearly sense that possibility. So what are you looking at as kind of some of your historical contextual kind of frames? Yeah, so interestingly, the Kali Yuga, so I'd actually just move recently from one part of the city to another. And one of the books that I was pulling out last night was the Holy Science by Sri Yukiswara. Sure, I know, of Yogananda. So he, the Holy Science goes really deeply into how the regular formation of the different ages from a Vedic standpoint are actually pretty confused. Yeah, he puts my lord different map for how things are working, which are much more in line towards things getting better. I don't remember exactly. But I remember being like, okay, this is a lot more hopeful and actually matches up to what's happening now. As you're saying this, I just want to point out one thing. Hey, I'm getting my chills, which usually are a signifier that something important is being talked about. I've learned not to discount those. Two, I know exactly what you're talking about.

And I think it stems from Lahiri Mahasaya, who was essentially Sri Yukiswara. There's the whole lineage there of Yogananda. And it was exactly what you're saying is he was basically like, listen, guys, you guys misread the tea leaves here. This isn't actually the Kali Yuga or what this is is means this is it was a much more optimistic picture of what was going on. So like, yeah, here the Lahiri Mahasaya talks about how their practice of self realization that Yogananda has brought to the United States and whatnot is actually a critical piece that's going to help build the brotherhood of mankind is what he called it. So, you know, a really unified humanity.

Similarly, I think the one that I'm most relate with is the one from my tradition. So the Vipassana Theravada tradition that I come from, there is a prophecy that has totally come true where, you know, for the first, when the Buddha arrives, when he rose about 2,500 years ago, he was the soul enlightened being on the earth. And then after that, very quickly, many thousands of people reached enlightenment through his teachings very quickly. So he taught what he was like about 35 and he died when he was 80. And through that time, he produced pure dama and so many people were benefiting from it and reaching these very high levels of, you know, freedom and awareness. And then it continued. And so the theory, I mean, the prophecy is supposedly that, well, actually a lot of it is fact, but the Buddha, from the moment that he rose, the teaching of pure dama spread widely throughout the world for 500 years. So you have actual, you know, that Buddha's teaching going all the way to Afghanistan, to Greece, it just covered the world widely all over the world, the known world at that time, it spread like wildfire. And so many people became completely free or reached very high levels of freedom.

And then after after the first 500 years from the Buddha's death, it became very small. So there was apparently the teachings weren't taught in the method that they were supposed to be given. They became very small. And there were still people who were achieving freedom, but generally, there was sort of a lull. And then 2,500 years after the Buddha passed away, there was supposed to be a resurgence. And what's amazing is that it's all come true, because if you think about the dama and its different varied forms has spread so very widely. And that's one of the, you know, globalization has had definitely had its negative impacts, but it has also come with really positive things too, because we've been able to share all this information through all these new bridges. And it's been able to get all over the world.

So the Vipasana that I'm a part of, it is, it has upwards of 160 centers all over the world, where they're constantly produced having 10 day courses that are completely free. You know, you can go and you can donate however much money you want at the end of the course. But I mean, I've gone twice without paying anything or donating anything because I didn't have any money. So to have this amazing teaching that in 10 days will completely change your life, and they give you this tool, and you can use it as much as you want. You can use it to live a really good life, or you can use it to be completely free. You know, you can take it all the way if you want. But now this teaching has spread like wildfire, and it is every so many people are doing it in about, you know, like 125,000 people meditate in my tradition a year, do these courses, and it's all fitting in line with the prophecy that 2,500 years after the Buddha, the pure Dhamma would once again spread across the world. And it has, it's all over the world now, and people are benefiting from it. And that's just one place, because like Yoga Nanda, you know, the Vedic traditions where it's totally different, they're also doing their job. You know, they also have their own properties, but here in my house I said that we're going to be a part of, you know, creating the Brotherhood of Mankind, and it's absolutely happening. You know, a new family is arising that's stretching the whole globe, and it's all of us who are developing this, you know, higher awareness and a deeper love for ourselves and all people. And it's not exclusive, you know, it completely exists. So I think you're covering your mic, you're covering your mic.

Sorry. Can you hear me now? Yeah. So one thing that I am going to write about soon is that I really deeply believe that on the new world that we want to live in, that we all sort of have, you know, in our hearts that is a possibility, it's not going to come about through our theories, right, but it's actually going to come about through our observance of love, compassion and good wealth. And that is sort of, you know, it may trouble some people, but it is actually in the observance and actually trying to live these ideals that we'll be able to build a new world, and not to say that our theories are not useful, they're extraordinarily useful, but they do not provide the answers and have not provided the answers, or the, you know, actually made the material change that we need. Well, yeah, you got to practice what you preach. That's basically what it comes down to. You're coming up with conceptual theories. It's great to read a lot of stuff, not until I started beginning to put this stuff into practice in my own life. Did I really actually understand or get to see any type of result, not that that's the goal. Don't be attached to the result, but that's really, that's true. All right, I have a few questions at the end. I really think we could talk forever. And I really want to get together in person and see maybe if we can put some stuff together with saw to in the city, because I think there's, there's a whole rich, so many veins here. But even before I get to my ending questions, how did you get into Goenka?

Oh man, it was like super, super random. My friend who I'm so grateful he went to go travel after college back in 2011. He was traveling through India, and he just randomly, he like saw a sign, and he signed up and went, and he, you know, this is one of my best friends, a buddy of mine who I used to like get drunk with, just get sold, heard with, and, you know, be total assholes with together to other people. And then he went away for 10 days, we didn't hear from him, then we got an email from him, and he's like, all he could talk about was love, compassion, goodwill. And I was like, what the fuck happened? You know, what did you do? And he told us, I did vipassana, you can go check out this website. And literally the moment I heard the word vipassana, I was like, I got to do it. I got to do it. I don't know what it was. And it definitely, like I believe in past lives. I definitely feel that, you know, I've been, been practicing this technique for a while, because I really, you know, this, this process takes, it takes many lifetimes. So it's just another lifetime, well, I'm, you know, trying to get closer and closer to freedom. But I went there and it was absolutely stunning. The first 10 days that I did back in July 2012, they were so extraordinarily difficult. Yeah, it was shocking, shocking, shocking. But when I came out, I realized that I had learned more in 10 days of intense meditation than I did in the four years that I went to college. And that's when I was like, okay, there's something big here. There's something huge. So like right after that, I signed up for another one, like two months later. And, you know, just going, going, going since then.

That's so awesome. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's clear from just this conversation hearing you speak about this that, yeah, I also believe in past lives, I believe that things happen for a reason. And, you know, I'm sure your friend and you have many, many lifetimes of karma going back to promote that type of response. Yeah, I mean, I hadn't, I had an experience where I took some LSD back in about 2003 and didn't end up coming down for about three months. And that was kind of like a vapassana retreat in the fact that everything was one giant synchronicity. It's partially where the name of the show came from. And you learn when you have these types of experiences and you got all the point of it is all I could talk about for those three months was unconditional love, which I had never spoken about before. I didn't know what it was. I didn't know why anyone would care. It was very interesting thing. Now looking back, you know, there's easier ways of processing and what it may have meant. But listen, I want to get to our final questions. I definitely want to do this again. I definitely want to meet up in person. And I just want to also, you know, anyway, I can support what you're doing as a writer, as a speaker, as a thinker, any of this stuff. We will continue to talk about that after this podcast, because this has been one of my favorite episodes to date. This will be in the 70s. So let's do the last questions. What is your favorite color? My favorite color is definitely blue. Definitely mine too. What is your favorite number? My favorite number right now has to be. That's a tough one. I'd say seven. Nice. Nice.

And I weirdly had a feeling you were going to say that. What is your favorite animal? My favorite animal. My favorite animal doesn't exist on this plane, but it's a dragon. Cool. With it. Totally with it. Totally with it. Okay. And last question. What's a practical tip that you could share with people listening that has helped you in your life? I would say the most practical thing, I think you touched on it when you were talking about creativity and how, you know, a lot of people meditate in different ways where they don't necessarily, you know, they need, they need to find what they jive with. And whatever it is that you do, make sure that you do with honesty, because that's why when you're being creative and you're, you know, creating music or drawing or whatever it is, and you're actually feeling better at the end of it, that's because there's an massive amount of honesty that you're activating through the process. Because if you're being honest, you're not going to be creative in your best modes possible. But be honest with yourself. When you, when you end that alienation with yourself, you're going to see miracles happen in your life. And secondly, find a practice that suits you, you know, be courageous, like go out there, try new things. It could be anything energy healing, creativity, what not just find something that really produces results for you. And that will really help out not only you, but the world. Really, I love it.

Diego, AKA young poi below, dude, this has been awesome. I'm so happy saw introduced us. I'm looking forward to having more conversations and getting to know you and helping get kind of what you're talking about more out in the world. So thank you so much for coming on. Likewise, Noah. Thank you so much. Cool. Well, we'll be in touch. Yeah, definitely. Take care. Bye bye. [Music] Thank you people who listened past the music. I have a promise for you when I get back from Los Angeles, I'm going to be making a whole lot of new music. And I'm going to have some new little intros, outros, interludes. And I'm setting down the promise for myself to finish an LP, little, little short form for track, musical composition thing that I'm going to put out this year. So stay tuned for that. Thank you as always for listening. Please go follow young poi below on Instagram. He's also on Facebook. I'll be sharing his stuff regularly, but it's a nice way to inject some good mindful aware positivity into your life. If you want to support this podcast rating and reviewing, still a wonderful option. We're stuck on 69 ratings. So I think that's probably a joke from the people who listened to this podcast. And it's not going to move for a while. But if you want to bump it up, we get to 169. That would be cool. You can also donate greatly appreciated if you can do that at syncpodcast.com. You'll see the donate thing in the menu. Other than that, that's it. I'm gonna have a fun time this week on Saturday. I hope to see you there March 18th.

It's right. We said we've covered this. It's at East, well, 420 East Third Street. So yeah, that's pretty sweet. I will see you guys next week.